This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

In early 2008, I was working for a company that was using Ruby on Rails as the framework behind the application we were building. For the most part we were happy with Rails, but there were things we wanted to do that Rails was just not a good fit for. First we realized that what had started as a Web 2.0 application was anything but that. Instead, we came to the conclusion that we were building a rather large portal application.

For all of its pros, Rails has a few cons as well. I won't go into all of them now, but the biggest disadvantage we found was that Rails doesn't want to help you write complex portal applications. It wants you to build smaller, simpler applications—at least, at the time it did. With Rails 3.0 on the horizon, that may change.

In addition to building this large portal, we decided we wanted to split our application into many applications. The advantages we saw were smaller code bases that were easier to maintain and separate applications that were easier to scale. We also could push updates and new features sooner, because we didn't have a gigantic code base to worry about.

We identified three main problems. First, we wanted to let each application maintain its own set of routing, but we wanted the other applications to be able to use the dynamic routing we had become accustomed to in Rails. We didn't want to hardcode URLs in the other applications; we wanted them generated by the application they would be linking to. Second, we wanted to share views and layouts among these applications. We didn't want to have to deal with SVN externals, GIT submodules, or symlinks. We wanted to be able to quickly say, "Here is a URL for a layout. Render it like you would a local layout." Finally, we wanted to share models and libraries throughout all these applications without having to worry about packaging them and redeploying all these applications each time we made a bug fix to a model.

With these goals in mind, I set out to find a Ruby web framework that would help us achieve these goals. After downloading and testing nearly 20 frameworks, I was at a loss for the solution we needed. Then I found Rack.1 Rack bills itself as a framework for frameworks. It is a middleware abstraction layer that lets framework developers get on with developing their framework without worrying about things like parsing requests and talking with application servers. Within a few hours I had a simple MVC-based framework up and running, and the Mack Framework was born.

I then spent the next year building and developing a large feature set for Mack, including all the libraries to handle distributed routes, views, and models. During that time I was asked time and again to make these components available outside the Mack framework for others to use. In April 2009, I announced an early version of a library I dubbed Distribunaut.

Distribunaut2 is a port of one-third of the distributed features that are found in Mack. In particular, it focuses on making it incredibly easy to distribute models and other Ruby classes. You will not find distributed views/layouts and routes in Distribunaut. The reason is that they are too specific to each of the web frameworks out there, and coding for each one would be a lot of work.

So with that brief history of Distribunaut, let's look at what it can do for us.

Installation

Installing the Distribunaut library is simple. It can be installed using RubyGems:

$ gem install markbates-distribunaut -s http://gems.github.com

You should then see something similar to the following, telling you that you have successfully installed the gem: